Navology Privacy Policy

The Short Version

The Navology app has no accounts, no analytics and no servers of ours. We never receive your trip, your location or anything else about you. Your itinerary lives on your device and, if you turn on sync, in your own private iCloud — where we cannot read it.

The navology.app website works the same way by default: plan a trip without signing in and it stays in your browser. It differs from the app in two ways, both optional and both described below — you may create an account so your trips follow you between devices, and hotel results carry booking links that may earn us a commission.

Which Product This Covers

This one page covers two separate things, because they behave differently and it would be misleading to average them together:

• The Navology app for iPhone, iPad and CarPlay. Sections 3 to 8 describe it. Nothing in it has changed: no account, no server of ours, nothing collected.
• The navology.app website, including the Trip Planner and Where to Stay pages. Sections 9 to 12 describe it.

Where a section says “the app”, it means the app only. Where it says “the website”, it means the website only.

Who We Are

Navology is made by Stack Studios LLC, a studio based in San Jose, California. You can reach us at hello@stackstudios.ai with any question about this policy.

What Stays On Your Device

Everything you put into the app: your trip, its days and stops, your notes, your bookings, and any photos of tickets or confirmations you scan. None of it is sent to us, because we operate no server that could receive it.

Location

Navology asks for location for two things: to tick off a stop when you arrive at it, including while the app is in your pocket, and to follow you on screen during live walking or driving navigation after you tap GO. Your location is read on the device, compared against your own itinerary and route on the device, and then discarded. It is never uploaded, never stored as a history, and never shared with us or anyone else. Spoken turn-by-turn guidance is synthesized on the device; your position is not sent anywhere to produce it.

You can decline location entirely and keep using the app; you simply check stops off by hand. You can change your mind at any time in iOS Settings.

Camera

The camera is used only when you choose to scan a booking or ticket, so it is available offline. The resulting image is stored with your trip like any other content. It is not sent anywhere.

iCloud Sync

If you are signed in to iCloud, Navology syncs your trip through Apple’s CloudKit into your private database, and if you share a trip, into a share that only the people you invite can open. This is Apple’s infrastructure and your Apple account. Stack Studios has no access to that data and no ability to read it. Apple’s handling is governed by Apple’s Privacy Policy.

Turn sync off by signing out of iCloud or disabling iCloud for Navology in iOS Settings. The app continues to work on the device alone.

What Navology Contacts, And What It Sends

The app works offline. It reaches the network in only these cases, and none of them carries anything personal:

• Apple iCloud — to sync your own trip, as described above.
• OpenStreetMap’s Overpass service — to refresh rail line names and colours. The request contains a geographic box covering the region of your trip. It does not contain your location, your itinerary or any identifier.
• Apple Maps or Google Maps — only when you tap a directions button, which hands off to that app in the ordinary way. Until you tap, nothing is sent.
• Apple’s routing service — when you start live walking or driving navigation, the app asks Apple Maps for the route, which sends the start point and destination of that one journey to Apple. This is the same request Apple Maps itself would make, governed by Apple’s Privacy Policy; Stack Studios never sees it.
• Apple’s geocoding service — when you type a destination while creating a trip, or drop a pin on the map, the app asks Apple to name that place or find its timezone. The request carries the text you typed or the point you pressed — nothing else.

Train routing runs entirely on your device against rail data bundled inside the app, so planning a journey involves no network request at all.

What The App Does Not Do

• No accounts, no sign-up, no email address collected. The optional website account described below is a website feature; the app has no sign-in and does not use one.
• No analytics, telemetry, crash reporting or usage tracking of any kind.
• No advertising, no ad identifiers, no profiling.
• No third-party SDKs. The app ships with none.
• No selling or sharing of data. There is nothing for us to sell.

The navology.app Website

You can use the whole website without signing in or telling us anything. A trip you build while signed out is held in your browser’s own storage on that device. We do not receive it, and it does not leave your machine except as described under Maps below.

Two things about browser storage are worth knowing, because they affect your work rather than your privacy: clearing your browser’s site data deletes a signed-out trip, and Safari deletes storage for sites you have not visited in about seven days. An account, or an exported link, is how you keep a trip past either of those.

Maps. The map and the place search are Apple MapKit. When you search for a place or the map loads tiles, the request goes to Apple and carries what you typed and the area being viewed. This is Apple’s service, governed by Apple’s Privacy Policy; we do not see it and we do not log it.

Analytics. None. The website sets no analytics cookie and runs no tracking script.

Accounts And Saved Trips

An account is optional. Everything on the site works without one; an account exists so that a trip you make on your laptop is there on your phone, and so it survives clearing your browser.

If you create one, we store:

• Your email address, so you can sign in and recover access.
• A cryptographic hash of your password — never the password itself. If you sign in with Apple or Google instead, we store only the identifier that service gives us, and never see a password at all.
• The trips you choose to save: their names, the places you added, and the number of days and hotels. A trip is a list of places you typed — it is not a record of anywhere you have actually been, and the website never asks for or receives your location.
• The dates the account and each trip were created and last changed.
• Any rating or review you choose to write about a hotel, together with the display name you choose to publish it under. Reviews are public: anyone visiting the site can read them, and search engines may index them. Use a display name you are comfortable being public — it does not have to be your real one, and we do not publish your email address.

About reviews. Writing one is optional and no part of the site requires it. You can edit or delete your own review at any time, and deleting your account removes your reviews with it. We may remove a review that is abusive, is not about a stay, or appears to be planted by or against a hotel — a ranking is only worth reading if the ratings behind it are real. Ratings feed the hotel ranking in aggregate; a single review moves it very little by design.

We do not store your name, your address, your phone number, your payment details, or any location history. We do not build a profile of you, we do not use your trips for advertising, and we do not sell or share personal information with anyone.

Where it lives. Account and trip records are held by Supabase, a hosted database provider, on servers in the United States. They process this data on our instructions and do not use it for their own purposes.

Keeping it, and deleting it. We keep your account and its trips until you delete them. You can delete an individual trip at any time from inside the site. To delete the whole account, email hello@stackstudios.ai and we will remove the account and every trip attached to it within 30 days, along with any backup copy on our next backup cycle. We will not keep a shadow copy afterwards. An account left untouched for three years is deleted along with its trips.

Your rights. Wherever you live, you may ask us for a copy of what we hold about you, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it, by emailing hello@stackstudios.ai. If you are in the UK or the EEA, our lawful basis for holding your email and trips is the contract you enter by creating an account — we cannot provide a saved trip without storing the trip. If you are in California, we do not sell or share personal information as those terms are defined by the CCPA, so there is no sale to opt out of.

Booking Links

Hotel results on the Where to Stay page include a link to book that hotel. Some of those are affiliate links: if you book after following one, we may be paid a commission by the booking site, at no extra cost to you. Following such a link hands you over to that company’s website, where their privacy policy applies and they may set their own cookies to attribute the booking.

This does not affect the order of the list. Hotels are ranked by travel time to the activities you entered, computed on your own device; a hotel is not moved up because it pays, and no ranking position is ever sold. Nothing about you is sent to the booking site until you choose to click.

Service Providers

The website is run with a small number of providers, each receiving only what it needs:

• Netlify — hosting. Its servers process the ordinary request data any web host sees, including your IP address, to deliver the page.
• Supabase — the database holding accounts and saved trips, if you create one.
• Apple MapKit — maps, place search and hotel results, as described above.

Children

Navology is a travel planner intended for a general audience and is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect information from them. The app collects nothing from anyone. If you believe a child has created a website account, email hello@stackstudios.ai and we will delete it.

Your Control (The App)

Because your data stays with you, you do not need to ask us for it. Export a trip to a file from inside the app at any time. Deleting the app removes its data from the device; deleting the trip, or turning off iCloud for Navology, removes it from your iCloud. There is no copy of it anywhere else.

Data Rights

Laws such as the GDPR and the CCPA give you rights to access, correct, export and delete personal data held about you. For the app we hold nothing, so there is nothing to request; data in your iCloud is exercised through your Apple account. For a website account, those rights are described under Accounts and saved trips and are exercised by emailing us.

Attribution

Navology’s rail data is derived from OpenStreetMap, © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database License. Track geometry for Japan additionally incorporates the National Land Numerical Information (Railway, N02) published by Japan’s Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism (MLIT).

Changes

If this policy changes, the date at the top of this page changes with it. Material changes will be noted in the app’s release notes.

Contact

Questions about this policy: hello@stackstudios.ai.